georgeob1 wrote: You have, perhaps inadvertantly, misrepresenteed Bennetts obvious meaning and intent in his statement, in part by omitting his words immediately preceeding and those following the piece you quoted. He was referring to "scientific" claims published by supporters of abortion on demand that there is a correlation between the increased incidence of abortion and a concurrent decrease in crime rates. The referenced paper claimed that the increrased use of aboprtion to eliminate unwanted children by women unable to support or rear them properly was a profoundly beneficial phemomenon in our society.
I think you are talking about a fairly famous paper by Steven Levitt. Levitt is one of Chicagos best economists -- which is saying something, and is not suggesting an overly liberal bias. I didn't read his original paper, but have read his summary in the book. Judging by that summary, the paper addressed dozens of competing explanations that had been offered for America's declining crime rates over the 1990s. Levitt's project was to test which ones of these explanations withstood serious statistical analysis. Many popular candidates did not pass the test (including tougher law enforcement) . Several obscure ones did pass the test, including the now-famous one about abortion. I don't believe Levitt's analysis is either implicitly or explicitly racist; and based on his credentials, I am willing to vouch that there is no need to put the word 'scientific' in scare quotes when describing it. In particular, I am certain that Levitt did not talk about black embryos. Only Bennet did -- that was the tasteless part I talked about.
But when sensitivity police, echoed by Blatham, complained about Bennet's argument, they completely missed that that was exactly his point: He
presented it as a bad argument. The full context at mediamatters.org, which I pointed to in my last post, makes this clear. The the accusations against Bennet is 20% valid core, 80% hot air.
EDIT: Here is what Steven Levitt himself has to say about the affair:
Quote:It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. . . . In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. . . . He made a factual statement (if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down), and then he noted that just because a statement is true, it doesn't mean that it is desirable or moral. That is, of course, an incredibly important distinction and one that we make over and over in Freakonomics.
Source
Bennet and Levitt both make sense to me, even if Bennet could have worded his point better.
Nice one, Thomas
